Photographer John Movius Discusses War and Perception in His Project, Sight Range

INTERVIEW BY SARAH ANDIMAN | DECEMBER 15 , 2005

In 2003, John Movius was the recipient of the New York University/Tisch School of the Arts, Daniel Rosenburg Travel Fellowship. The Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Photography and Imaging awards the grant annually to one graduating senior to complete and exhibit a project involving travel. Movius used the grant to complete a project called Sight Range: Photographs and Stories by Soldiers of Desert Storm. This collaborative piece explores the way soldiers involved in Desert Storm have used photography as a method of personal documentary. Sight Range provides a venue for these soldiers to tell their stories and exhibit documents of war of a different nature from those seen in the newspaper or on the TV news. The project was first exhibited at Tisch’s Gulf and Western Gallery, and can also be seen on the web at www.regardingwar.org. In the following interview, Movius discusses the inspirations for the project, the way he put it together and his ideas for future work.

SA: In your online introduction, you mention the project initially started through a project called Aerial Surveillance, also about images of war. To what do you attribute your overall interest in war?

JM: On a very basic level I am interested in war because I am very confused by it. I don’t think I am a particularly morbid person. I was really struck by Susan Sontag’s recounting of her first experience looking at Holocaust images, around the age she hit puberty—she said that “something broke.” I have a similar experience with this imagery. My world changed when I saw it. I was 12 or 13 and became obsessed with the subject matter. I read every book in my school library on World War II and the Holocaust. The section was, coincidentally or not, close to the Sex Ed books, sort of hidden in the back of the small library. I guess on a fundamental level I was trying to understand how we, as a species, could do these things to ourselves.

Like most Americans, and perhaps most every human on the planet, I grew up with ghosts of war in my family. My uncle fought in Korea, and his uncle was killed in World War II. My grandfather was recruited in WWII because he was an archeologist and had experience reading topographical maps. In the army he used those skills to decipher aerial maps of enemy territory to figure out what to bomb. In other words, the same skills that he used at home to decide what areas of earth to preserve and document, he used in war to decide what areas to obliterate.

SA: Did anything you saw or read have a particular impact? You mention the CNN broadcast pictures. Were these pictures you had seen while researching for Aerial Surveillance? Were you influenced at all by the CNN photos of the first bombings of Afghanistan in October 2001? (I have a strong memory of those.) Are those the type of images you saw of the first Gulf War?

JM: Yes, the media really establishes specific and consistent imagery around certain events, even though there are infinite ways of depicting that event. I vividly remember the aerial bombing images shown on CNN during the first Gulf War. My mother and I were in some fast food restaurant in Boston, Friendly’s or something, and eating apple pie (no joke) when they announced on the TV that the bombing was underway. Keep in mind, I was eleven. We went home and watched the aerial bombing images on CNN while eating ice cream. The green, swampy images really freaked me out. What the hell was I seeing while I was eating ice cream? Recently, I met a woman from Sarajevo who, during the war, sat in front of a TV in Germany and watched one of those bombs that has a camera on it detonate on the bridge she played on as a child. What a bizarre thing--this disconnection and connection at the same time.

But back to the Gulf War: I remember there being such an intense change in the community overnight. Suddenly there were yellow ribbons everywhere. People were talking about any and everyone they knew who was over in the Gulf. In school we sent letters and drawings to the soldiers. The radio stations played those two songs, “Just get here if you can” and “Voices that Care” over and over again. I wanted to support the troops—I idolized them—and yet I was so confused by the whole thing…what was happening exactly? Could someone please explain it to me? No one really could. And then it was over on CNN. I think I had a pretty typical American experience regarding this war. It was intangible for most of us, and yet we all somehow were involved.

SA: Once you started getting the idea for the project and finding veteran’s sites, how did you make contact with them? How did you introduce yourself? How did they react?

JM: I emailed people who had posted photographs, or I posted a description on various online groups and communities. Gulf War vets were really the first group of veterans to use the Internet to connect with each other. This is an incredibly interesting network, and I encourage people to do some research online and browse some of the groups. I also posted in some clinics. I received a bunch of responses. People were for the most part incredibly open and warm and really interested in the project.

SA: What were some of the reactions to the project? I assume the people that ended up being the main subjects had a pretty positive feeling about it. Did you get a sense of general feelings veterans had about sharing photos and stories? (I imagine it is hard to generalize, and obviously those that were not interested in discussing it probably did not post their photos.)

JM: The reaction was really positive. One woman who I spoke with said that it felt reassuring to know that vets from the first Gulf War were not forgotten amid the media blitz about the current war. It is not easy for the photographers to talk about the photographs. Even though most of them are not explicitly gruesome or violent, the photos are very charged. Tyrone Steel put all of his pictures in an album when he came back in 1991, and the album went straight to the back of his closet for ten years. I met another vet at the New York opening who said he had done the exact same thing. Tracie Stevens burned an entire roll of negatives when she got home. Sometimes the people I worked with were surprised by what pictures I chose to exhibit. They did not think that the photos were interesting enough.

SA: How did receiving the grant help you develop and expand the project? Would you have done it differently if you had not received the grant?

JM: The Rosenbergs chose an amazing and touching way to memorialize their son, Daniel, and I am grateful to them. It really touched me when they told me that Daniel would have particularly appreciated the project. With the grant money I was able to buy a camera and pay for some of the travel expenses. That was huge. It also made an enormous difference to have the support of the Photography and Imaging Department. There are so many people working there whom I respect. Lorie Novak was a great advisor to have. Her experience with the issues that arise in collecting other people’s photographs was very helpful.

SA: How were the images (both the four veterans’ as well as your portraits) exhibited? Both your explanation of the project, as well as the veteran’s stories seem very key. Was this text displayed with the photographs?

JM: The images were inkjet prints that were pinned to the walls. I did not want frames. I did not want to labor under the illusion that I was somehow creating “Fine Art”. The pictures are not commodities; they are not sacred objects in an elite white cube. The text was a huge part of the show. It was important to me that the veteran’s words accompany the pictures. The stories are powerful and the show would not take the time to read the text, and I broke it up into manageable sections, which were displayed, in small frames around and in between the photographs. The layout was crucial. As it turned out, visitors read almost all of the text, and people I spoke with were very grateful it was there to flesh out the photographs, to give them a greater meaning, and to let the individual voices comes through.

SA: How do you hope reading and seeing this exhibit will affect people? Will it just raise awareness? Get stories out? How do you think it relates to the current situation in Iraq?

JM: I think the photographs are intensely confusing. This is what initially drew me to them. We look to the photographs coming out of complex events such as war, or political change, to tell us what point of view we should take on the event. Even the Terry Schiavo fiasco is a great example of this. On a certain level, we want the photographs to tell us what to think. This is what sells newspapers. The photos taken by the soldiers don’t do that. After looking at their photos I am more unclear, more stymied by the subject than before. Because of their ambiguity, I see them as more apt reflections of what war really is. And I think the vets involved in the project are grateful that they can share their own stories because there is minimal spin, minimal pontification, compared to what you might find in vet stories through other media outlets.

I don’t want to preach with this project. I don’t want to tell people what to think. I have pretty specific opinions regarding our (US) involvement in Iraq and the Middle East in general, and I think it is important to keep talking about these issues. I can’t pretend, as an artist, that my opinions and perspective won’t come through in the realization of a project- that would be silly. But the project is not about me. With Sight Range I really wanted to deal with the varied opinions and perspectives—the literal points of view—of the soldiers themselves.

The project needs to increase awareness on veterans’ issues. Whether or not we agree with the Gulf War, we need to understand that veterans are facing a huge struggle when they come back home. There is little or no safety net for many vets. The VA(Department of Veteran Affairs) is under-funded and overwhelmed. I think some of these issues come through in the project, and I am glad of this.

SA: The Regarding War website strikes me as both a record and venue of/for the project? Was that the basic intention?

JM: Yes, I wanted to bring the photos back to the web, which was where many of them were initially made public. Also, the vets could not make it to New York to see the show, so the online version is crucial.

SA: Have other veterans contacted you because of the website? Do you have any plans to continue to document the situation in Iraq?

JM: Yes, perhaps the most odd example was an email I received from a friend of William and Michele Coker, who had lost touch with them. Through the project the friend learned of William’s death, and I was able to re-establish contact between her and Michele. It was also interesting to speak with a NYU student veteran of the current war who saw the show. He was struck by the images because they were both familiar and foreign. So much of the imagery was the same for him and yet he had been there thirteen years later. He was disconnected by this déjà vu. I am working with new images coming from Iraq, which will be included in the show at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, this July.

SA: How would you say this project relates to your other projects? War, conflict, and the perception of it, seem to be re-occurring themes.

JM: Yes…I think perception is key, both on a personal and cultural plain. I think another important theme is memory. With Reliquary and Between SlithersandPosture, both multimedia pieces, I was really exploring the subconscious roots of perception and memory. They were much more personal. They were addressing my own psyche, and the inherent conflicts within it, that are perhaps universal, using totemic imagery, imagery from my dreams, from by body. In Slithers I was interested in the concept of viruses, how they work with your body and fight against it at the time, about the cannibalism the body commits on a cellular level, about the relationship between sex and disease, the violence of sex, the idea of memory as a virus in the body and so on.

SA: What are you working on right now and has this project influenced it at all?

JM: I recently finished a project called Screens, which uses images from video games of war, and this was hugely influenced by Sight Range. I am also working on my own photographs, and hope to self-publish a collection of them in the fall.

www.johnmovius.com

Published November 29, 2005